The present invention relates to shower door assemblies. More particularly it relates to such assemblies in which the door panel is provided with an adjacent shelving unit.
There is a desire to store a variety of products (e.g., for cleaning or conditioning hair, or cleaning a shower enclosure), soap, razors, brushes and other personal care items, in or adjacent a shower enclosure. One approach to address this desire was to hang a shower caddy or a basket from the showerhead or from a top wall of the door header. Such devices could be knocked or tipped by a user in the shower stall. Further, when they were hung over the shower head and the shower was on, the stream of water made it more difficult to access the storage device. Also, these devices took up some of the space in the shower stall and were often somewhat unattractive.
An alternative was to provide fixed storage space along or adjacent enclosure walls. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,070,549 provided a soap niche in a column positioned immediately adjacent to a pivotable door, as well as a “shelf” region below the niche. U.S. Pat. Nos. D405,517 and D444,866 showed shower stalls including shelf areas arranged vertically for retaining shower supplies.
A slightly different approach was shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,564,963, which depicted a door provided with an array of horizontal bar-like structures on the outside of the door panel. The bars could be used for hanging various items such as towels, washcloths, and articles of clothing for drying.
These devices suffered from various disadvantages. For example, shelves provided in such systems typically had a number of recesses which were difficult to clean. Furthermore, some of these assemblies were positioned in dark areas of a shower enclosure, where it was difficult to see the products clearly that were stored thereon (e.g., to read labels on the stored products). Most also suffered from lack of adjustability (e.g., to accommodate different size items being stored).
Therefore, there remains a need for an improved storage system for use in connection with shower enclosures.